THE DAYS IN FEBRUARY

by Cappucinno

Day 17, Work.

Malon sat on the kitchen counter with her legs swinging idly back and forth, her gaze periodically drifting from the front door to Link's closed bedroom door. The clock read 4:30. The sky was still caught in the period betwixt twilight and the first touch of dawn, the pitch dark lightening to a rich navy. The sun was still an hour's span away from making its first appearance of the day.

The redhead slapped her cheeks in an effort to stay alert since the faint flicker of the dying overhead fluorescent light was doing a poor job of helping her. The steady drip of the coffee maker wasn't helping either, it might as well have been a white noise machine that had a dual purpose of taunting her with coffee that was not yet available to consume. Malon was decidedly not a morning person.

Link's bedroom door cracked slowly open at 4:35 and the bakery owner came stumbling out with all the grace of a zombie with his eyes still screwed tightly shut.

"You're gonna be late." Malon said groggily, which only caused Link to screw his eyes up even more and wave his arm at her in a vaguely dismissive way.

"Link you have twenty five minutes to be at the bakery." The redhead chided, rolling her eyes as she watched her boss/friend/apartment-mate bumble through their living room towards the bathroom. "Link—"

"Shhhhh." He hissed, feeling around for the bathroom door rather than opening his eyes to find it.

"You really don't have time to shower—"

"I have to pee." Link said, clearly exasperated, finally cracking one of his eyes open to simultaneously glare at her and locate the doorknob before promptly reclosing it.

"O-kayyy." Malon rolled her eyes, willing the coffee machine to work faster. It was 4:30 in the morning and she had to be awake to get his business day started. Malon hardly thought he had the right to be fed up with her. Good grief.

Link re-emerged a moment later.

"Did I hear a flush?" Malon asked, raising her eyebrows.

Link disappeared back into the bathroom and a loud sigh trailed after him, followed shortly thereafter by the sound of a flushing toilet.

"Hands?" Malon called, feeling rather smug when half a beat later the sound of water running followed.

There was a period of almost anticipatory silence between the water shutting off and the bathroom door creaking open again.

Link's eyes still weren't open but he was doing an impressive job of avoiding the furniture as he half stumbled and half dragged himself back towards his room.

"If you're going to commit to this schedule, you could at least pretend to be good at it." Malon muttered, earning nothing but another dismissive hand wave.

A good five minutes passed before Link re-emerged from his room, this time at least looking a little more like a living human if not more put together. His re-entry coincided perfectly with the beep of the coffee maker indicating that their life blood was ready.

"Thank Din." Malon said, hastily pouring herself a mug of steaming-hot coffee.

Link was not far behind her, all but snatching the pot out of her hands before she could replace it. She didn't bother to scold him, knowing from experience that her words would fall on deaf ears.

Mutual silence fell upon them as they partook in their morning ritual. Five minutes passed and like clockwork they set their mugs down in unison on the countertop.

Link had finally opened his eyes, though he was still squinting like it was painful to do so.

"Alright. Break it down for me, what does the schedule look like today?"

"Well," Malon finally flipped open the leather-bound planner that had been sitting in her lap the entire time she'd been waiting for her boss to wake up and make it to his morning coffee. "In fifteen minutes you are going to arrive at the bakery," Link nodded. "You are going to proceed to make every single pastry you will serve through lunch time. You will simultaneously prep every casserole, soup, bread, whatever that is on your menu so that the only thing poor Shane has to do is warm it up when someone orders it. You will have six hours to do this. Then you're going to meet with Sheik and I at 11:35 at a location I will pick—"

"But I thought—"

Malon silenced him by holding up a single threatening finger.

"No. You make terrible lunch meeting decisions. I'm picking. And he will go over the state of your company's finances and make some recommendations. I'm planning on this spilling way past lunch, followed by actually meeting with people from our financial planning firm and actually getting to work on making you, you know, not charging down the path towards bankruptcy—maybe figuring out a way to kick that asshole off of your board so he can stop tanking the firm, et cetera. This is going to take up your entire afternoon."

Link scowled at her and she ignored him with the utmost professionalism.

"At which point, we're going out to dinner."

"Out to dinner?" Link raised his brows, managing to look at once irritated and flabbergasted. It was decidedly not his most attractive expression. "With whom?"

"With Sheik. And with Zelda." Malon said matter-of-factly, snapping her planner shut.

"Wait wait wait—is this the same Sheik that you went out on a date with that one time you made me have dinner with Zelda alone?"

"Yes. Yes it is."

"You're dating your boss?" His tone was decidedly judgmental, earning him a decidedly unprofessional scowl from his red-headed friend. "I thought you said he was some pre-med college guy? Sheik owns an accounting and PR firm."

"Technically, I work as an independent contractor—and you are paying me to be your live-in assistant, so you are my boss. But yes, teeechnically I'm also on the payroll at his firm for some freelance accounting work, so he is also my boss. Sort of. And he is stupid smart, so he may pick up a medical degree."

"What? Is he stupid or smart?"

"…Your coffee obviously hasn't kicked in. He is so smart it's stupid."

"You are simultaneously the most and least professional assistant I've ever worked with."

"Ah," Malon nodded sagely over her own cup. "And that, sir, is why I'm also your friend. Now get out of here. I'm due for breakfast with Zelda in like, an hour and a half and I need to get ready."

"That makes no sense, it does not take that long, I just woke up like ten minutes ago and I have to be at work in—"

"You do not have time to lose this argument with me. Go. Go." She pried his coffee mug from his hand and gestured with it towards to door. "Out. Time to go to work."

"Wait, why is Zelda also coming to dinner?"

"Link, I said out!"

"Is this another set-up? Malon I do not need to you to be pulling any stunts with my personal life right now."

She pointed him to the door without deigning him with a response. With little room to negotiate he sighed and obeyed, muttering under his breath the whole way.

Seventeen days. It had been seventeen days since she had walked into Beyond Bizarre Bakery and unwittingly gotten herself caught up in the snare of one blonde haired master-baker with narcolepsy and more charm than one man had any business possessing.

It had been seventeen goddess-be-damned days that he had been on her mind and—

Everything smelled like chocolate chip cookies. Goddesses-be-damned, every single thing in her apartment smelled like chocolate chip cookies. It was literally impossible not to think about that man or that bakery.

The scent pervaded the entirety of Zelda's apartment and she couldn't for the life of her figure out where the damned smell was coming from. She'd done the laundry at least twice, all of it, since the smell had somehow transferred from her one set of work clothes onto everything else in the universe that she owned (the mechanics of this were far beyond her comprehension).

In addition to making her and her home smell like a high school girl who had just discovered cheap perfume it was also maddeningly counterproductive to her goal of not thinking about Link. Because thinking about Link, she had recently discovered, was a horrific and endless spiraling cycle of ridiculousness that she could not as an adult woman stomach in good faith.

"Shiiiiit," Zelda hissed, looking up from the laundry in her hands to the clock. "I'm going to be late, goddesses!"

She took a deep whiff of the shirt in her hands. Cookies. She threw it aside and grabbed another. Sniff. Cookies again. Another shirt—still cookies.

"Get it together Zelda." The blonde took a deep breath—full of cookie air—and grabbed one of her work dresses. "There is literally nothing in this godforsaken apartment that does not smell like that godforsaken bakery. I am going to murder him. Stupid Link. Stupid cookies. Stupid, stupid, beautiful man."

Because even if she had helped willingly, it was still his fault that she'd ever felt compelled to help in the first place. If he hadn't been so infuriatingly Link she might have gotten through two weeks of knowing him without kissing him and then she wouldn't have had to apologize for playing aloof with Malon and then she wouldn't have felt so bad and gone to see him and she wouldn't have seen how utterly, hopelessly overwhelmed he was and then her apartment wouldn't smell like chocolate chip cookies.

In short, it was all Link's fault. Stupid, beautiful, Link's fault.

She held on to that mantra as she hustled into her work clothes with seconds to spare, just barely remembering to grab her shoes before she ran out the door.

In the end, despite her best efforts, Zelda was—she glanced anxiously down at her watch as she waited for the elevator doors to slide open—five minutes late to work. Damn. The elevator opened on her floor with a cheerful ding, announcing her tardiness as she stepped into the lobby of Nabooru's firm.

"Harkinian!" Zelda winced at Nabooru's sharp tone. "You're late!"

Zelda hastened to the conspicuously empty reception counter, hurriedly placing her things down.

"We've been getting calls all morning—"

Zelda looked askance at her boss who had come out of her office to scold her.

"It's been five minutes, Nabooru—"

"Don't you five minutes me!" Nabooru scowled, pointing accusatorily at her with one manicured nail. "I run a business, not a charity, and I expect you to be on time."

Zelda opened her mouth to say something, then shut it abruptly. She frowned.

"…Are you messing with me?"

Nabooru rolled her eyes. "It's five minutes, it's not the end of the world."

Zelda exhaled loudly and sat down in her chair, scowling at her boss.

"That being said if there's some exciting reason you're five minutes late—"

"No, I just happened to hit all the red lights—"

"Don't you walk to work?"

"Nabooru, you still have to wait for the light to change when you're a pedestrian."

"Do you now?"

"…Nabooru, do you not wait?"

"Don't I have the right of way?"

"Please tell me you aren't being serious."

"Well, I suppose that makes sense. I just assumed people here were extra aggressive drivers."

Zelda didn't dignify her with a response, choosing instead to start her computer up for the day. The Windows start-up tune played and Zelda chose to pointedly ignore the fact that Nabooru was still hovering behind her.

"Zelda?" Nabooru asked after a beat of silence.

"Hm?"

"Why do you smell like a promiscuous twelve year old?"

She mentally cursed Link for the thousandth time that morning as she attempted and ultimately failed to explain to Nabooru why she smelled like cookies. Nabooru, being the Gerudo she was, had simply raised her brows meaningfully and wandered away with a skeptical 'hmm'.

Some hours later, Zelda found herself thinking about a certain bakery owner as she scrolled through her e-mails. Something had been nagging at her.

"He knew my name." She murmured under her breath, not quite quietly enough to avoid catching Nabooru's attention.

"What was that?" The Gerudo woman asked, raising an arched eyebrow at her off-task secretary.

"Nothing," Zelda flashed a smile at her boss. "Just thinking out loud."

"Not about anything you're being paid to think about." Nabooru chided dryly, poking her head back out of her office. "Come on, you made me hire you as my secretary. At least do the job you made me give you."

"You didn't have to hire me Nabooru." Zelda said flatly.

"Right." Nabooru nodded. "Whatever you say, princess."

"Don't call me princess."

"Force of habit. Besides, if I hadn't given you a job you were going to end up unemployed. You're overqualified for just about every position short of the ones that you refuse to accept."

"It's important to me to work on my own merit and not just because of my family name."

"Yeah, well, having that family name happens to have given you a world-class education and leadership experience that puts even me to shame."

"I disagree."

"That doesn't exactly detract from the fact that regardless of how you got the experience, you've got a resume to die for."

"I'm just a receptionist Nabooru," Zelda smiled charmingly, though her tone was anything but.

"Aren't you having a dinner meeting with the big boss today?" Nabooru pointed up at the ceiling, referring to Sheik's private office a few floors above their own.

"Yes but that's personal."

Nabooru raised one skeptical eyebrow.

"We're childhood friends."

Eyebrow back down.

"I'm really just a receptionist."

"Well if you're so sure about it." Nabooru tapped her finger back on the monitor. "Come on, you know, respond to e-mails and answer some phones and stop daydreaming."

Zelda saluted half-heartedly, rolling her eyes. "You got it, boss."

As they waited for Sheik at the firm's penthouse office—Malon had ended up deciding sometime between 5 am and now that they were to cater lunch directly to Sheik's office to cut down on wasted time—Link was deeply engrossed in reading the morning news as Malon paced around the room in the midst of a passionate (or so she hoped) speech that he was

"…And so, overwhelming evidence leads me to believe that you, honorable Link Forester, have a thing for my dear friend Miss Zelda Harkinian!"

Link was, as ever, unimpressed. This particular outburst didn't even get him to look up from his morning paper.

Malon visibly deflated. "Link. I just made a grand announcement."

Link took a sip of coffee and mm-hmmed without looking at her.

"Link."

No reaction.

"Link."

More coffee, still no acknowledgement of her existence.

"You are really, incredibly, extra boring today." Malon sighed, sitting herself back down on the edge of the table."

"Hey." Link finally looked up from his newspaper, his expression faintly irritated as he looked from his red-headed assistant to the table. "Off."

"What?"

"Off." Link snapped his fingers and pointed at the floor, already back in his paper.

Malon had just taken a deep breath—no doubt the beginning of a tirade—when the conference room door swung open without preamble. Sheik took silent stock of the scene unfolding before him, gaze inscrutable.

Link looked up at Sheik from his morning paper, half-frozen in place by the shock of the sudden entrance. His free hand was still extended towards the floor in his effort to get Malon to stop sitting on to table. He was, for once, dressed in proper business attire albeit his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, his shirts and pants were wrinkled beyond belief, and his suit jacket was a heap on the corner of the table.

The table itself was covered two inches deep in paperwork with red ink scrawled across every visible inch of it. Malon, as put together as ever, sat perched on the edge of the conference table, her mouth caught in a wide "o"—she'd looked like she was just about to start yelling or start doing something else equally loud—frozen just as it had been when he'd walked in and interrupted their scene.

Sheik took a deep breath and counted to three in his head.

Link's hand dropped abruptly and his characteristic grin fell easily into place as if he'd just been reanimated. "Oh, Sheik, good morning—what brings you on by?"

"Link," Sheik greeted, as verbose as ever. His red-eyed gaze flickered over to Malon, the faintest ghost of a frown marring his otherwise stony composure. "…Malon."

Malon slid guiltily off the table.

"I came to discuss…" Sheik's gaze dropped to the table and as unflappable as his expression was he was clearly unimpressed as he waved a hand at the mess of papers. "…this."

"Great," Link smiled crookedly, waving his hands theatrically over the table in front of him—newspaper flapping in one hand as he did so—"behold, my finances!"

Sheik sighed, running one hand through his hair as he took in the mess before him. "Malon?"

"It looks pretty hopeless," Malon shrugged. "I can't see a way out."

Sheik frowned at her and Malon just shrugged some more.

"It's not like he doesn't already know that Sheik, I mean, look at the guy." She gestured towards Link and all of his frumpy glory. "He's a mess."

"Malon." Sheik sighed. "We've discussed this."

"What can I say? I'm an honest person." Malon smiled.

Sheik sighed again, longer and louder, and let the door swing shut behind him. He took a long look at the table in front of him before finally approaching and setting his briefcase down on a chair.

"…Really?" Malon asked, looking surprised. "You too?"

Link looked between the two of them, perplexed.

Sheik didn't say anything but his head lolled to one side as he took a seat, arms crossed against his chest.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Malon nodded. "Well, let's get to it then. Link, put down the paper."

Sheik looked expectantly at him and Link stared openly at the near-monosyllabic Sheikah and the suddenly telepathic Malon.

"…I understand very little of what is happening right now." He said slowly.

Malon rolled her eyes unsympathetically. "He said to put your paper down."

"I…" Link had the good sense to not finish his thought—which was of course that Sheik had barely said anything. "Right. Of course he did."

A/N: Important! I've done some light editing and Link is now Link Forester and not Link Sonoma-additionally he has fallen into the role of CEO for Hearth and Forester rather than Williams Sonoma. It feels much better to me this way. I haven't much motivation to write lately, but, what do you know it's already February (one year later) so I finally made myself sit down and take a look at this project again. Here's to hoping that this month will keep reminding me to sit down and finish the Days in February (or try) before another February passes. Thank you for all of you who are still reading this years later, it means a lot to me! If not for you this thing might have sat in the dust forever.